Deathwish

People who can trade rough words without batting an eye tend to get along better than most, and the speed with which the Emperor and Dunadan reached the same conclusion bore that out.

“…If this spreads, it turns into a free-for-all.”
“I agree, Your Majesty.”

Anyone who handled a supernatural power knew one fact. Every supernatural power was a god’s own authority, sent down by that god to its own subjects. That made it power in its purest, undiluted form, something never to be damaged or altered. Someone born under one god’s dominion and granted its power answered to that authority alone, and to handle a different supernatural power they would have no choice but to give the first one up. Handling two ‘simultaneously’ was a tremendously rare talent, because it amounted to being chosen by several gods at once.

And in the middle of all that.

That Aiden fellow had used the two most peculiar supernatural powers of them all at the same time: pure-white ki, which out of every kind of ki only Noelle had ever been able to use, and divinity, which only the Holy Kingdom’s royals could use. For sheer difficulty of mastery, neither would take kindly to being called second to anything.

“I was looking forward to seeing what he would show, mind.”

Muttering, the Emperor snapped shut the document folder lying on the table. Inside was a photograph someone had been quick-witted enough to take at the scene. It showed, plain as day, the thing bursting out through the force field Noelle had spread and tearing it apart like cardboard.

“There are only two among the Holy Kingdom’s royals who can pull anything like that.”
“The Pontiff and Deathwish, you mean.”
“That is right.”
“…Quite the remarkable uncut gem.”

Granted, it was too early to rank him among the monsters who stood for an entire nation. Even so, he had unmistakably shown the potential to be placed on that line.

On the bright side, this alone would instantly silence the many who griped that the fellow had no right to snatch the seat of the Lionhearted’s groom. The goal had been achieved. The problem was how well.

The Emperor lit his pipe again and narrowed his eyes. As befitted a man who had seen every sort of thing since rising to the Empire’s throne, he was surprised, yes, but behind the surprise he was coolly running the numbers.

“Dunadan.”
“Yes.”
“Keep their mouths shut.”
“Of course.”
“Doing a decent job of it will not be enough. Put a watch on every one of them, and draw personnel from the Imperial Assassination Bureau if you need to.”
“Though there will be no stopping word from reaching a few of them.”
“I do not even hope for airtight security over the long run. But just letting it show that the Emperor of the Empire is taking this much care will serve as a shield for a while. Anyone who tries to lay a claim on that fellow is picking a fight with me.”

A talent of that caliber was bound to be talked about sooner or later. But at the very least, word of it must not spread right now. This was a continent that had not even finished repairing the direct damage of the war.

In a place like that.

Drop in a big fish giving off a smell this ‘delicious’, and predicting the scale of the free-for-all to follow would take no great effort.

They had one more reason to go out of their way to avoid it, too, because the Emperor and Dunadan both held the same impression.

“…Too good to hand to anyone else, is he not?”
“Of course.”

The Emperor and Dunadan looked at each other and grinned. Handing a lottery ticket that was already slated to win over to somebody else would be far too galling.

“Noelle has him on a leash, so for now let us keep our grip on him through her.”

He had assumed the girl had hauled in some sickly specimen from goodness knew where. What a windfall it had turned out to be. With that, the Emperor lowered his gaze once more to the pillar of fire printed in the document. In truth, it made a fairly interesting sight.

The pure-white ki Noelle puts to use, and an ultra-high-temperature divinity rare even among the royals…

Ki fundamentally had no particular attribute, but in exchange it held an outstanding advantage in output and total volume. Divinity, by contrast, carried destructive offensive power through its heat but was hard to push to high output.

And yet.

The pillar of fire Aiden had raised on the spot felt like pure-white ki, with its strength in ‘output’, mixed with divinity, with its strength in ‘offensive power’. As though the two properties had been ‘combined’, with divinity pouring out the way pure-white ki did.

Surely not.

The Emperor let out a snort of laughter and packed his pipe from the tobacco pouch again. However he looked at it, the assumption was too far-fetched. Taking only the advantages of two supernatural powers and blending them together? If such a thing were genuinely possible…

…That is omnipotence.

There was no guessing what scale of monster he would grow into.

Aiden stroked his chin as he looked over the newly arrived information. What he had counted on had apparently worked exactly as planned.

I did stand out, enormously.

He had figured that if things went well there might be a reaction from this side too, but even Aiden had not foreseen firepower coming out on that scale. Thanks to it, he had picked up one skill-copy ticket apiece from human beings of tremendous caliber. He had no reason to complain.

But.

It was all very well that skill-copy tickets had dropped so he could prepare for the event. Still, couldn’t the thing have dropped something a little more reasonable on him? Wasn’t this going rather too far?

No.
Absolutely not…!

This world’s ‘main scenario’, the very thing he had struggled so hard to stay out of, was now right under his nose. Gathering skills was only preparation against the dangers directly in front of him; he had no intention at all of actually replacing the protagonist!

One way or another, I am getting out of this…!

That aim had not changed once since the moment he was first dragged over here, because he did not even want to imagine what road through hell would open up if he got caught up in the scenario. To make matters worse, it now said in writing that a new event pulling him in that direction would occur within three days.

Looking at it the good way…

Since something was definitely going to happen then, he could at least ‘prepare’. Until now he had only been dragged around by events he could not even identify; with this one written out for him, he could at least guess which way the wind was blowing. The verdict on whether he could ‘get out’ of the scenario would probably be handed down here.

“…”

Aiden set to rummaging intently through what knowledge of the original still lingered faintly in his head. Going by how things had unfolded there, he could more or less guess what sort of event this was. For one flagged outright as formally tied to the scenario, the odds of everyone peacefully trading pleasantries were vanishingly low.

Violence, and blood, and somebody’s pain would follow.

What he needed right now, then, was abilities for combat.

…In that respect.

The skills written here hardly matched his aptitude, but they were reassuring enough, because when the event broke three days from now, these would be his lifeline.

So I can mix supernatural powers and amplify the effect…

Aiden’s grasp of what a supernatural power even was remained hazy, so he could not tell how much this would really do. Even so, a property like this made one inference easy enough: the more kinds of supernatural power he had, the more monstrously wide his options would become.

Then the best option for now was…

It would have to be this person, after all.

The moment he selected the window, the chieftain’s skills came streaming down to fill his field of view. As befitted the title of Dragon Hunter, most of them looked fearsome, but Aiden was after only one thing here.

The Tribal Confederation’s warriors wielded dharma power by way of an interdiction. He would have to learn to handle it by degrees, but given the character of the abilities Aiden held, surely no other skill right now would give him this much efficiency.

“…”

Of course, even in a situation like this, there was someone who stayed exactly the same. Aiden kept stealing glance after glance at Noelle in front of him. That free-for-all had happened only yesterday, yet her attitude had hardly changed.

“Is there something you would like to ask?”

She must have felt his gaze, because Noelle smiled faintly and tossed the words out at once. For all that so large an accident had blown up only a little while ago, her air was as unchanging as ever: all courtesy, with a smile worn like a mask.

“…No.”

He remembered her going pale with shock when he handled divinity yesterday, but here in the office with him now she was no different from any other day. When he put that to her, the answer came back in the same level tone.

“I was certainly very surprised when I first saw it, but—”
“But?”
“Did I not tell you from the start? That I brought you in because you are a person whose ceiling cannot be seen.”

“…”

“…To be honest with you, I do not remember it myself, but you act as though you have known me for a long time, Aiden.”

Ah.
Right. I did that.

Come to think of it, only a little while back he had pulled that con to wriggle out of a tight spot. From where Noelle stood, it could only feel like one more hidden fact coming to light about a man whose identity she did not even know.

“—You still have no intention of telling me what you meant before, I take it?”

“…”

Dame Noelle smiling, chin propped on her hand, speaking in that insinuating voice, was honestly nerve-racking. But he had no way of telling her, because he had never met Dame Noelle before in the first place…!

“Then you may simply stay as you are. It will be more fun to find out for myself.”

“…”

I keep telling you, there is nothing there.

Aiden sighed inwardly and stretched back against the chair, hoping to rest even a little.

Of course.

A window popping up out of nowhere like that promptly robbed him of even that modest attempt at rest.

Aiden screwed his eyes up hard.

…What is this now?

Inside the royal palace of the Holy Kingdom of Craven there was one room everyone was reluctant to enter. Its lights stayed out from morning to evening, and strange noises rang out inside it at all hours. Senior officials often used it to trick new hires into believing a ghost haunted the place, and the trick worked surprisingly well. But nobody would have the nerve to crack that joke in an official setting, because every single person in the palace knew perfectly well whose room it was.

“Katya.”

The Holy Kingdom’s First Prince, Alester Pancious Craven, spoke up again in a worried voice. The gold vestments that marked him as the legitimate heir gave off a soft glow, so even in the darkness he could more or less make out what his ‘little sister’ was up to.

“…Did you hear me properly, Katya?”

What came back instead of an answer was a gunshot.

The sound of flesh being pulped and bone being crushed filled the room. It had no place in a leisurely conversation, yet neither of the two people in the room changed expression in the slightest. Not the First Prince, who had just watched a gun go off before his eyes, nor the Second Princess, who had ‘put the gun to the middle of her own forehead and fired’.

“I keep telling you to stop doing that.”

Yet Alester’s voice, for all he was watching such a thing, was as level as ever, the tone of someone scolding an unruly child over a prank. As though he had seen the like dozens of times over.

And in fact.

A voice as innocent as a child’s, well suited to that tone, came back in answer.

“Ah, didn’t hear you. What’d you say?”

She had just fired a gun into her own head, and she acted as though it were nothing at all.

“…”

Alester looked into the darkness with troubled eyes. A sticky sound, the kind that bores into the ear, kept coming from over there. It was screened off and hard to see, but he could guess what was happening beyond it to his sister’s bullet-pierced head.

Incomprehensible. Nauseating. Repulsive. Hideous.

However kindly one put it, the phenomenon could not be called anything better than those words.

Katya Heinkel Craven was a once-in-an-age genius whose talent overwhelmed even the Holy Kingdom’s royals, a monster whose capacity ranked among the greatest of any user of divinity in history. Yet to her, the nature of the supernatural power she held could only be called a ‘curse’.

Alester dropped his gaze and went on calmly.

“It’s a mission. Mother handed it down herself. She said an important person has turned up inside the Empire.”
“An important person?”
“She said he holds divinity. Without being one of the Holy Kingdom’s royals.”

That apparently came as a surprise even to Katya. Her golden eyes, unmistakable even in the dark, fixed on Alester and blinked, gleaming faintly.

“How is that even possible?”
“She said he is a holder of multiple supernatural powers.”
“Weren’t those something that only existed on record?”
“They say one has been found this time.”
“Credibility?”
“Fairly high.”

Katya fell silent for a moment, blinking, plainly sorting out the situation in her own way from what she had just heard. For all her utterly grotesque behavior, her mind was quick.

“Then we have to bring him in, don’t we?”

The way she grasped in an instant what the Pontiff wanted, with no need to spell out another word, bore that out. Alester smiled bitterly and nodded.

“It looks as though you will have to go yourself. You may use force; you must bring him back without fail.”
“Me, of all people? Isn’t that using an ox cleaver to kill a chicken? Has Her Holiness finally lost her mind?”

At the blasphemy that leapt out so boldly, the bitter smile on Alester’s lips deepened. In truth, she had a point. Bringing the man to the Holy Kingdom was not difficult in itself. Divinity belonged to the Holy Kingdom’s royals, and if it had manifested in an outsider, at the very least the facts had to be investigated, which also put the justification on the Holy Kingdom’s side.

But even so.

As for the reason to send out something this utterly unstable… a ‘monster’.

“He’s the Lionhearted’s groom, that man.”

The moment she heard it, Katya’s eyes narrowed.

“It concerns her own groom, so there is no telling how the Lionhearted will react, and above all the Emperor of the Empire has already made it clear that he means to shield him. There may well be an armed clash.”
“The Lionhearted’s groom?”
“Yes. The name was, I am sure—”
“Aiden Kellermain.”

This time it was Alester’s eyebrows that bent at an odd angle.

“…That’s right. How do you know that? Up until yesterday he was a complete unknown.”
“I happened to have a little interest in him.”

With that, Katya yawned and rolled about on the bed. Murderous backdrop aside, she looked exactly like a languid cat.

“Brother. This Aiden person.”
“Mm?”
“How strong is he? How does he look to you, Brother?”
“…Going by the rumors alone, considerable. Maybe not right now, but he will certainly grow strong.”
“Strong enough to kill me?”

She asked it as innocently as ever. Alester bit his lip until it bled; he knew better than anyone what the question meant.

“…There’s every possibility.”
“Ah.”

Katya broke into a wide smile.

“Then I absolutely have to bring him in.”

The name she went by.

Deathwish.

Which is to say: one who wishes for death.

The woman who bore that name answered with an utterly pure smile.

“I’ll be off, then. To the Empire.”